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Criminal Justice Issues
Since there is no official legal definition of sexual homicide, therefore sexual homicide cannot be truly characterized as criminal behavior.
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Although there is no specific legal definition for sexual homicide, homicides that are listed as "criminal" include the killing of humans by either murder or manslaughter, so a closer look at what "sexual homicide" really refers to is warranted. In the book Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides, Louis B. Schlesinger explains that there is a "blurred distinction between a sexual murderer and a sex offender who commits a murder" (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 6). The sexual offender who murders his victim may not have intended to commit the murder at all; the victim may have resisted and the offender responded violently and killed the person. Hence, Schlesinger writes that this was not a "sexually motivated" murder because murder wasn't on the mind of the killer at the start of the act.
However, a murder in which the offender kills a prostitute after he rapes her, and fully intended all along to commit...
Given that Schelsinger's book is eleven years old, some of the data he reports could be out of date, but it is interesting that the FBI "Behavioral Science Unit" has not (at least up to that point) estimated the number of sexual homicides in the United States. Likely this is because of the fine line between a sexual deviant who kills in a moment of rage or passion and a person that is psychologically bent on killing women and carries out his gruesome task.
The FBI may not wish to further muddy the waters when it comes to defining or categorizing sexual homicide. It seems strange though that the FBI would not work harder to establish motives in all homicides so that the public could understand the trends and be made fully aware of the kinds of hideous characters lurking out there in the shadows, waiting for a female to be available for slaughter.
Unlike the U.S., Canada does keep statistics on sexual homicides, but there is a question as to whether the 4% of homicides in Canada that are listed as sexual homicides are…
Works Cited
Douglas, J.E., Burgess, A.W., and Ressler, R.K. (2008). Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives -- Paperback. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Schlesinger, L.B. (2003). Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides. Bocas Raton, FL: CRC Press.
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